The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923Early in this century, Futurist and Dada artists developed brilliantly innovative uses of typography that blurred the boundaries between visual art and literature. In The Visible Word, Johanna Drucker shows how later art criticism has distorted our understanding of such works. She argues that Futurist, Dadaist, and Cubist artists emphasized materiality as the heart of their experimental approach to both visual and poetic forms of representation; by mid-century, however, the tenets of New Criticism and High Modernism had polarized the visual and the literary. Drucker suggests a methodology closer to the actual practices of the early avant-garde artists, based on a rereading of their critical and theoretical writings. After reviewing theories of signification, the production of meaning, and materiality, she analyzes the work of four poets active in the typographic experimentation of the 1910s and 1920s: Ilia Zdanevich, Filippo Marinetti, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Tristan Tzara. Few studies of avant-garde art and literature in the early twentieth century have acknowledged the degree to which typographic activity furthered debates about the very nature and function of the avant-garde. The Visible Word enriches our understanding of the processes of change in artistic production and reception in the twentieth century. |
Other editions - View all
The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923 Johanna Drucker Limited preview - 1994 |
The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909-1923 Johanna Drucker No preview available - 1997 |
Common terms and phrases
acoustic image activity advertising aesthetic analysis Apollinaire articulated artists aspects attention avant-garde basis Calligrammes character collage concept context conventions critical Cubist cultural Dada defined Derrida discourse discussion distinction domain early twentieth-century effect elements engagement existence F. T. Marinetti figure formal formalist Francis Picabia function Futurist Giovanni Lista guage guistic historical Ilia Zdanevich Iliazd instance investigation Khlebnikov Kruchenyk Ledentu letters linked literature Mallarmé Manifesto manipulation material means ment mode modern art practice modernist normative notion painting Paris phenomenology phonemic phrase Picabia pictorial play poem poetry poets position Prague School present printed production publications radical realm relation representation role Roman Jakobson Russian Russian Formalism Russian Futurism Saussure Saussure's semiotic social sound specific structure symbolic Symbolist theoretical tion tradition Tristan Tzara twentieth century typo typographic typographic experiment typographic experimentation University Press visual and verbal visual arts visual form writing zaum Zdanevich